This invention relates to a margarine containing fish oil using a particular refined fish oil as one of the oil materials.
Oil materials used in margarine include such solid fats and oils, which are solid at normal temperature, as hardened oils obtained by hydrogenation of animal and vegetable oils such as soybean oil and fish oil, beef tallow, lard and palm oil, and liquid oils which are liquid at normal temperature such as soybean oil, cotton seed oil, and peanut oil.
If margarine is produced from solid fats alone, the resulting margarine is too hard to be penetrated with a spoon, and has a low content of fatty acids containing double bonds, thus having a low nutritive value. Therefore, liquid oils are added as one of the oil materials to obtain an adequate softness of margarine with a balanced fatty acid composition.
For the liquid oils such as described above, vegetable oils have been predominantly used in view of the flavor of the resulting margarine.
On the other hand, fish oil contains a large amount of highly unsaturated fatty acids such as eicosapentaenoic acid (hereinafter referred to as "EPA") and docosahexaenoic acid (hereinafter referred to as "DHA"), and has been known to be effective to properly control the content of cholesterol in blood in living bodies and to prevent thrombotic disturbances, thus being suitable as a liquid oil to be used in margarine.
For such a reason, there has been proposed in Japanese Patent Publication Laying-open No. 15444/1980 a method for obtaining a margarine which has a well-balanced nutritive qualities, using a fish oil having a high content of EPA as the liquid oil. The fish oil used in the proposed method was once refined and therefore odorless immediately after the refinement, however, there was a problem that the fish oil produced fishy-odor substances with passage of time to emit fishy odor. Therefore, the proposed method has used a masking agent such as kaolin or calcium phosphate to mask the fishy odor if it is produced in the margarine. However, the produced fishy odor in the margarine has been too strong to be completely masked with the masking agent.